


After 02x05 (The Three Days of the Hunter Job)

by PseudoLeigha



Series: (More) 2AM Conversations [18]
Category: Leverage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 14:50:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6524584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec and Parker discuss the difference between lying and teasing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After 02x05 (The Three Days of the Hunter Job)

Alec Hardison likes to think he’s a brave person. Maybe not compared to Eliot, but it’s his job to fight bad guys with guns, and maybe not compared to Parker, but he’s not entirely sure that girl is even capable of feeling fear sometimes. Compared to, like, Nate, though, or Sophie, or like, _normal people_ , he’s pretty brave. At least an average level of badass. He doesn’t freak out about spiders or snakes or jump scares in horror movies or germs or the fact that he knows exactly how many people want him and his closest friends dead, and when he’s on the con, he’s got nerves of steel. He’s been held at gunpoint before and never pissed himself, which he thinks should count for something, at least.

All of that is to say it wasn’t good for his ego when Parker broke into his apartment in the middle of a raid, snuck up behind him and said, “I know you lied to me, Hardison,” because he just about shit himself (and totally got killed while he was distracted). She spun his desk chair around to glare at him more effectively, hands on her hips, and that look that Eliot labeled ‘crazy eyes’ combined with the most ferocious scowl Alec had ever seen her wear. “Tell me why,” she demanded, and, well, he wasn’t about to say no to the crazy eyes. Girl was terrifying!

Hardison’s apartment, the whole top floor of a swanky building downtown, was the least like Parker’s place of any of the team’s residences. The closest she could compare it to was Sophie’s, but that wasn’t saying much at all, because they both had lots of probably useless stuff around, but Sophie’s all looked sophisticated, like the houses Parker used to rob, and Hardison’s just looked cluttered, despite the fact that he had about twice as much space as she did. Parker figured that meant he had about four times as much junk. Most of the time when she broke in, she practiced memory games, moving things back to the place they were in the time before, or just fiddled around with them trying to figure out what they were for, but she didn’t have time for that tonight. Or rather, she did have time, but if she wanted to get answers, she needed to surprise Hardison, and that wouldn’t happen if she spent half an hour re-arranging the books and dolls on the shelves and playing with various electronic gadgets.

Or maybe it could have. She wasn’t even trying to be quiet, and he still jumped about a foot when she spoke to him. She put on her best ‘don’t fuck with me’ face before she spun his chair around. She thought he and Eliot liked her, but either they spent this whole job lying to her, or Sophie had, when Parker was telling her about Bigfoot, and she looked so confused and asked with that ‘I’m worried about you more than usual’ face who had told her all that and then carefully explained that all of the conspiracy theories were wrong… except maybe the one about the Council. Except it probably wasn’t really called the Council. Somehow, she didn’t think it was Sophie at fault this time.

“What?” Hardison asked. “Hold up a second, girl. What’d I lie to you about?”

“Area 51,” she said, ticking theories off on her fingers. “Area 52. The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot. The Easter Bunny. X-men. Vampires. Virus mutant zombie apocalypse. Do you even really have a plan for that?”

Alec would have laughed if he wasn’t completely terrified that she would take that the wrong way. “Uh, yeah, I do.” Everyone should have a zombie apocalypse survival plan. That was just good sense. Just in case. “Who, uh… told you we lied about those things?” He would have asked why she wasn’t interrogating Eliot, since he was the one who started it, but he suspected the answer was that she knew he was the weaker link, and he didn’t really want to hear her say it.

“Sophie. Well?”

“Damnit, Sophie!” Really, he had expected it to take longer than five hours to figure out that none of that stuff was real.

“Why did you lie to me, Hardison?” Parker asked again, uncertain as to why it was apparently so difficult to answer her question, especially since his ‘damnit, Sophie’ made it clear that he and Eliot _were_ the liars. Hardison was really smart. It shouldn’t be that hard for him to answer a simple question. “I thought you liked me.”

“W-what? Of course I like you. I like you a lot, Parker.”

“Then _why_ did you –”

“Why did I lie to you, yeah, I heard you, girl.” He hesitated and she scowled at him, waiting for his actual answer. “We were just teasin’, Parker. We didn’t mean anything mean by it.”

“Teasing?” For the first time since she arrived, Alec heard a note of uncertainty in her tone. Maybe, if he was lucky, he would be getting out of this without getting stabbed with something not meant for stabbing. Or at all. That would be good.

“Yeah, girl. It’s just… fun. Y’know, like how Eliot pretends he can’t use a computer to mess with me, an’ Sophie uses all her innuendoes with Nate to make him uncomfortable. It’s… a way of showin’ you’ comfortable with people.”

“So… you lied to me because it was funny because you felt comfortable with me?” Parker did not, Alec thought, look impressed with his reasoning. He had to admit, when she said it like that, it sounded really stupid. “I don’t get it.”

Would it be wrong to tell her to go ask Sophie? Alec wondered. Relationships, like real world interactions between people, at least the talking about them part, weren’t his strong suit. He could get along alright, like, in the moment, but explaining how and why people worked? Forget about it.

Hardison sighed and then tried again with different words. “It’s more like… okay, when you trust a person, see, you feel safe making them a little uncomfortable, an’ it like, gets their attention without worryin’ that they’re gonna run off on you, or you gonna scare ‘em away. Like pokin’ a person, it’s a little irritating, maybe, but it makes ‘em pay attention.”

“Why couldn’t you just say ‘hey, Parker’ if you wanted to get my attention?” Parker grumbled. That was, she thought, the point of having a name.

“I… you just… it’s different,” Alec said, defeated by the Parker-logic. “Friends tease each other, alright? I can’t explain it better than that. You should maybe go ask Sophie.”

“Does that mean we’re friends?” Parker asked. She hadn’t really had friends since… ever. Definitely not since she moved to New York when she was fourteen.

Hardison was clearing his throat weirdly. “I, uh… I think we’re a little more than friends, Parker,” he said.

“Why? What are we, then?” she asked, at a loss as to what he might mean.

Alec chickened out. He could have told her that he liked her as more than friends. He should have. But he didn’t. “The team – we’re teammates _and_ friends. We, y’know, depend on each other. It’s more than just friendship. Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously, trying not to think _If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it._

“Oh. Okay.” Parker let a brilliant grin break across her face. That was a good thing. Teammates and friends. She could do that. As soon as she went to track down Sophie and asked the older woman why she hadn’t just said the boys were teasing her, and why, and what it all actually meant, just to be sure.

Alec was so stunned by the genuine smile lighting up Parker’s face that she was gone before he realized she was going, leaving with her characteristic lack of farewell. He was so torn between being pleased that she was that happy about being friends with him and kicking himself for probably putting himself in the friend-zone forever that he didn’t even notice when, half an hour later, he got a very angry text from Sophie, asking what the hell he was doing, sending Parker to talk to her at three AM.


End file.
